Description
Steven Hand (hand-crdb) commented:
Page: https://cockroachlabs.com/docs/v23.1/cockroach-start.html
What is the reason for your feedback?
[ ] Missing the information I need
[ ] Too complicated
[ ] Out of date
[ ] Something is broken
[X] Other
Additional details
This sentence describing the --external-io-dir
flag is:
- confusing and is possibly incorrect
- does not provide enough guidance in real-world situations
To set the
--external-io-dir
flag to the locations you want to use without needing to restart nodes, create symlinks to the desired locations from within theextern
directory.
First, it is confusing and possibly incorrect because it is describing how to not set the --external-io-dir
flag. Yet the sentence begins with "To set the --external-io-dir
flag...".
An alternate way of saying this might be something like:
To achieve an effect similar to setting the
--external-io-dir
flag, yet without needing to restart nodes, create symlinks to the desired locations from within theextern
directory.
Second, this sentence does not provide enough guidance in real-world situations because the approach recommended only works if the customer knows ahead of time what names CockroachDB will use for the items it creates in the extern
directory. Please consult with the development team to see if there is a way to address this.
For example, one approach might be to make the extern
directory itself be a symlink, instead of creating symlinks within the extern
directory. To do this, a customer would delete the extern
directory and replace it with a symlink named extern
. However, the development team may object to this approach because it requires manually making changes within a node's store.
Lastly, I want to mention that the approaches mentioned above are not mutually exclusive. It may be possible to both create symlinks within the extern
directory, and to make the extern
directory itself be a symlink. This may afford more options for customers, depending on how fine a granularity they may need for specifying file destinations.
THANK YOU
Jira Issue: DOC-8685